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As user trends continue to shift from search to discovery, creating the structure and process to support that discovery requires a sophisticated content strategy.

Instead of requiring users to categorize each board they create, however, Pinterest’s strategy is to involve other users. When someone comes across an uncategorized board, they’re asked to help by selecting one of the 32 categories from a dropdown.  So while Pinterest gives its user community a lot of free reign when it comes to naming and organizing content, this strategy is supported by well-placed guidance to help the community improve the quality and reliability of the content. Pinterest strikes a balance between flexibility and structure by involving users in enhancing site categorization while lowering the barrier to entry for users who would rather not spend their time categorizing.

Promoting older but still relevant content. Creating and promoting new content is important, but leading users to older content may also be part of your content strategy.

Justin Pearse recently wrote a nice article on the state of digital content. He argues that content needs to be thoughtful, meaningful and well executed for it to be effective – it should be less about the brand, and more about the audience.

While his argument is absolutely correct, it pivots on the idea that engagement often begins and ends with a piece of content. The reality is that the failure of content marketing is in the belief that content exists in a vacuum.If you create a piece of content and don't support it, you're probably going to be disappointed. In other words, if we define experience as the beginning-to-end engagement with a brand, then content is simply part of the spectrum.

Digital content needs to be supported by great user experience (UX), solid digital strategy, attentive channel management and smart technology. To reiterate – it must be part of a system.

When brands come to agencies for agile content development, the main criteria is usually that the content must be high quality, compelling, low-cost, high frequency, and quick-turnaround. But often their internal structure and processes aren’t yet optimized to embrace this type of approach. In agile content development, timing and efficiency is everything. Without it, there is no liftoff.

Brands can optimize themselves for agile content development by making internal adjustments that improve communication, the first of which should be to empower a small team to manage the process. This team should have the authority to secure and approve budgets, as well as weigh in creatively and strategically on content as it goes to market. Creating a nimble group that has real ownership of the process will make things more efficient and reduce the chances of unnecessary stress being put on your brand marketing team as a whole.

When strategy, creative, and production teams can sit side by side and collaborate fluidly, agile content is the by-product.

These days, developing a successful online presence requires approaching traditional digital efforts like link-building, web traffic, lead generation, and sales from a decidedly more editorial, content-rich approach: a hybrid marketing and storytelling strategy that drives customer actions by creating, documenting, distributing, and optimizing content. Some companies have created their own internal content development departments or are working with agencies to create everything from infographics to documentaries that highlight where the values, interests, and personality of brand and customer overlap. Coca Cola believes so strongly in the power of content that they are relying on this approach to help them double the size of their business by 2020.

While your office probably looks a lot different than a newsroom, approaching content strategy by thinking like a magazine publisher or a television producer is an effective way to approach content development and promotion. Utilizing influential voices to develop and promote content can help ensure that you meet the first requirement of securing readership and viewers--be interesting.

The people who already create for you: We often hear “write about what you know” because it comes easiest. Identify the talented storytellers within your own walls. Those with an intimate knowledge of company activities are primed to create impactful content, even on a tight deadline. Identify employees who are weekend filmmakers, amateur photographers, poets, and guitar players and invite them to bring these talents to the table.

A majority of Sweden’s advertisers now use some form of content marketing to enhance their brands

While 69% of those polled said they knew what content marketing was, nearly one-quarter (23%) said they had heard of it but didn’t know about it.

Among marketers who had content strategies, 80% said that form of marketing was at least somewhat effective at strengthening their brand, and a similar number said it nurtured existing customer relationships. More than half said it was effective for finding new customers. It was less good at generating direct sales, according to this sample.

The major takeaways from Google Panda and update (in no particular order) are as follows: Focus on original content – you will get hammered for “stealing” or repurposing on too high a scale (for example, lifting content from Wikipedia) Over-optimization kills – Google can sniff out sites that are designed solely to exploit certain key words (for example, repeating the same keyword, or variations thereof to drive traffic) Link to high quality/authoritative sites – while Panda focused more on a more systematic sweep of SEO, Penguin is focused on the processes around linking. Don’t over-link, and when you do create links, link to high quality sources Excessive Ads are Bad – If it looks like you are running too many ads against your content, you will face the consequences SEO is a “Bad Word” – The rise of the term “content marketing” effectively means that high quality content trumps low quality link bait.

Write Guest Blog Posts for Authoritative SitesContent marketing does not just refer to content you write for your own site, but content you write for other sites.

content marketing also improves SEO rankings and traffic.  Link building is a common SEO strategy that is always difficult to grow through a paid channel.  The best way to get organic and quality links is by creating interesting content that drives people to link and share your content.  Whether or not it’s directly related to your line of business, driving free traffic is always a victory.

at the conference there was also a welcome developing story urging content strategists to expand the range of their work and take a more active role in creating new ways of consuming, sharing, and dreaming up ways that content can be transformative. It’s a progression from, “I found what I was looking for” to “Look what I found!”

you need writers and team members who can think strategically about the content that will resonate most with your audience.

Search for people asking questions about your keyword or phrase on Twitter.

“Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information packrat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation and presentation.  Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant resources on a very specific topic or theme.”

content-out design4 — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down.

if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you can’t just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.

Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.

the so-called "long-read" could be seen as a nutritious, well-balanced meal, while snackable content is the fast food of the content world.

So "snackable content" is short-form data — be it text, imagery or video — that consumers can quickly engage with, possibly on-the-go, possibly on a smaller screen, that will hopefully leave them hungry for more, similar content in the future.

brands invest $44 billion in content every year.

The modern-day marketer balances left- and right-brain thinking. They use SEO and technology as an enabler and distributor, using content marketing creativity to build holistic content and SEO programs that result in measurable business outcomes.

SEO and content strategies need to be aligned for optimal marketing performance, yet the costs and time associated with training and development can negatively impact productivity, scale and revenue. This catch 22 makes it difficult to achieve such levels of collaboration, and divergence remains.

the role of content strategy is focused on the brand’s relationship with its target audience

with your content. Desktop PCs and laptops are where the internet matured, but nothing in technology stands still – and while platforms such as game consoles and TVs are currently underutilised, this will not be for long. It’s clear that mobile devices will be key in the future, but smartphones and tablets are not yet fully featured computers, and this poses one of the biggest challenges.

when planning you will need to ensure that your content is planned and built so that it renders in the way you intend on different browsers, operating systems, native mobile interfaces, mobile applications, media players and access technologies.

National Geographic has a wealth of information about Bengal tigers, but if the knowledge graph provides just enough information for the searcher, will he or she click on the National Geographic result?

There is currently no “opt out” option for Knowledge Graph. But I would argue that if the knowledge graph result will be showing anyway, wouldn’t you want your brand and your link in it instead of Wikipedia or a competitor as the source? At least if your website is present in the Knowledge Graph, your site may receive clicks via the link to more information in the Knowledge Graph result. Another approach to consider is to fight fire with fire: beat the Knowledge Graph altogether. How? Currently, one type of content that is not appearing in Knowledge Graph yet is video. However, video content, when well-optimized, often realizes more clicks than text entries.  A 2011 study by AimClear demonstrated that video can receive as much as 41 percent more clicks in organic search over text results.

Today I searched for “search engine” on Google. The first result was for Wikipedia, then came Dogpile, searchengine.ie, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. The Google search engine didn’t appear until the third page of results, which means it might as well be sitting on top of Mount Everest from a search findability perspective.The Google homepage is absolutely atrociously optimized for search engines, but tremendously well optimized for people who search. The Google design is focused on what the customer wants to do, which is to search and find stuff. Google is not focused on getting itself found but on helping customers find.

Yes, it’s important to get found. But what happens after you get found is crucial. From a customer’s point of view, finding a particular website is just the first step in completing a task.

Google wasn’t always popular. Once upon a time it was a totally unknown website run by two students. Its strategy to get found was based on being useful. That’s by far the best philosophy

Connect to consumers in context. Having great content is not enough. Consider the context in which it will be consumed. Are your consumers looking for quick-hit information on their smartphones, snackable content on Facebook, or in-depth information on your website?  Create visible value. What topics can you credibly provide value on, through information, education, or entertainment? Don't just create it; make it clear where the value is provided. Continuously measure and optimize results. Go beyond tracking data to measuring impact. Tie results like brand lift, content shares, and unaided recognition of the content to metrics that run the business like leads or sales.

“We are now looking at how we display and order content differently from screen size to screen size,” said Jeff Moriarty, Boston Globe VP of digital properties in an interview last year. “This ‘responsive content’ concept is emerging and we are starting to see in data that users want different types of content depending on their context and the device they are on. We have to now think about how content performs differently from the biggest screens to the smallest, how that content is organized and even how headlines are written from platform to platform.”

The first thing to think of when building a responsive site is simplicity.

some website builders may over-design for the desktop, making some websites fun to play with but absolutely impossible to navigate.

Marketing strategies will maintain their mediocre successes as long as we keep expecting engagement and loyalty from our customers without giving them the same consideration. However, by investing time and resources to develop great gobs of gorgeous content with compelling, interesting messages worth sharing, the scales will tip, the pendulum will swing. 

Make transmedia your best friend.  Get the most value out of investing in content by including multiple platforms and varied content around singular campaigns. During the planning phase, consider the different ways to connect to your audience and decide ahead of time to develop and integrate several of these platforms into your approach. Behind-the-scenes still shots at a video shoot can be published to Instagram, and money-saver tips used as website copy can be turned into a series of illustrated JPEGs and posted to Pinterest. Of course, it’s not necessary to always use every platform, but it is necessary to consider each platform.

the brands that win will prioritize engagement over exposure. They will flip the traditional approach of using mass reach to connect with the subset of people who matter on its head. They will super-serve the most important people for their brand first and use the resulting insights and advocacy to then broaden their reach and make the entire media and marketing plan work harder.

This generation has grown up living digital lives. This has fundamentally changed their relationship with media and technology — and with brands. They don’t want to be talked at, but they do want to be invited in to the discussion. They thrive on creation, curation, connection and community. As a result, we call them Gen C. The behaviors of Gen C have less to do with the year they were born and more to do with their attitude and mindset. For example, while 80% of people under 35 are Gen C, only 65% of Gen C is under 35 [1].

Gen C cares more about expressing themselves than any generation before.

Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.

with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.

“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”

Solid content strategy (what you’re going to post on your page)Promotion strategy (how you’re going to continually increase your fan base)Engagement strategy (how you’ll respond to fans and build community)Conversion strategy (how you’ll turn your fans into customers)

It’s perfectly within Facebook’s Terms of Use to do a giveaway on your fan page. The rule of thumb is does everyone get one? If the answer is yes, you’re good to go—that’s a giveaway. If the answer is no because you’re drawing select winners, then that’s a promotion where you must adhere to Facebook’s Promotions guidelines and use an app to administer the contest/sweepstakes.

the average ER for most brands and businesses is a mere 2%!